Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Fifty-Two Saturdays

I had my baby on a Saturday. 9:33 in the a.m. Pacific Standard Time, in fact. After a long and wearying night, and all the craziness and exhaustion and mean nurses and wishing I were somewhere else, it was a bright, beautiful sunny early summer weekend morning when we went from two to three.

Every Saturday since I have counted off the weeks since that day. Fifty-two Saturdays in all. I can remember cleaning out the fridge when she was one week old and thinking how strange it was that I had food in here older than the baby sleeping in the living room. I can remember when she turned ten weeks old and how much bigger and older she seemed to me, how different from when she was born. I counted off the weeks she’d been outside me and compared them to the same number of weeks from when she was in. At twenty weeks of pregnancy I was “halfway there” and barely starting to show; my twenty-week-old baby rolled over and over and tried to scoot around and made sounds that started to sound close to words. Forty-two weeks marked the point when she’d spent more time outside than in. I counted all those weeks, and the numbers seemed so big but the time seemed so short. Suddenly we were sailing through forty-eight and forty-nine and she was walking all by herself; fifty and fifty-one rushed up and I wished for a few more. I wished I could say “Wait! Stop! Slow down!” and have a little more time before her first year was over and I had nothing left of it but words on a page and pictures on my computer.

The 52nd Saturday was not her official birthday, of course. That fell on Monday. But I quietly marked the day to myself, an anniversary of sorts. I wondered if I would receive a t-shirt of the “I survived” variety now. Of course, that is a silly thing to think, because this mother thing is never past-tense. It is ongoing, ceaseless, constant. So for all my counting weeks of pregnancy and days past my due date and weeks and months of her life, there are always more to count. I will probably be calculating her age in weeks as we drop her off at her freshman college dorm. These fifty-two precious Saturdays will seem like an impossibly small amount of time. She will have had so many Saturdays, I will be unable to believe I ever counted them at all.

About Me

Many blogs out there are written by interesting people who traveled the world and had big, exciting lives before they produced children. This is not one of those blogs.
We're first-time parents, so of course we think we know it all. We are Midwesterners who trekked out to the dry mountains of California's Inland Empire and back again, then went South. We have a bunch of cats, smart mouths, two sets of the Firefly dvd's, and an unnaturally large collection of bed linens. You can email us at tragicallyordinary at gmail dot com.